The heroine of "The Meek One" is surrounded by shady types: either they want to help her, or destroy her / Solar Media Entertainment

Another young woman whose husband is in prison habitually sends him parcels with stewed meat and condensed milk. Each parcel is returned without explanation. Why are the parcels no longer accepted, what happened to her husband, is he alive or dead or transferred somewhere? Vasilina Makovtseva's heroine (let's call her Meek, as in the credits - her name is not mentioned in the film) goes to prison by train, but there history repeats itself: the parcel is not accepted, with the stern reply: "It is not allowed, contact the authorities." It is impossible to understand what these authorities are. Meek finds herself in the middle of an unfamiliar settlement, in which the prison is the central, city-forming enterprise. She is surrounded by shady, strange people who either want to help her or destroy her, promising answers to all questions, but instead only slip in a multitude of new ones.

Dostoevsky's "A Gentle Fist" was an internal monologue of the hero at the body of his wife who had committed suicide. Sergei Loznitsa initially wanted to use the basic plot of "A Gentle Fist", but then a completely different script was born from it - only the title and the definition "fantastic" remained, which suits the film much better than the short story, which the author labeled as such.

Loznitsa's "Krotkaya" ends with a long episode in which the sleeping heroine sees a complex, wild dream. But in fact, the whole picture is a phantasmagoria, a hellish dream from which the heroine cannot wake up. People on the bus quickly move from banal phrases like "Don't push, you'll rip my tights" to conversations about how someone dismembered someone with a saw, and about how they once carried a coffin on the bus. At the station, they start searching Krotkaya in the presence of a legless invalid sitting behind bars and making crazy comments ("Boss! Undress her! And give me condensed milk!"). A human rights activist (Liya Akhedzhakova) tells Krotkaya that all applications received by her office immediately end up in the hands of those very special agencies to which the applicants complain, "and there may be trouble - do you understand me?" The main man in the city, a crime boss, instead of solving Krotkaya's problem, suddenly starts telling her about a guy who "utilized biomass" near the front line, in other words, burned severed arms and legs in a mobile crematorium; once he saw - "a familiar hand, and a ring on the hand", and recognized his bride, who rushed to the front after him.

Russia once a day

The budget of "A Gentle Fist", according to the largest online film database IMDb, was 2 million euros, the project was financed by six countries: France, Germany, Russia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Ukraine. In Moscow, the film is shown in only four cinemas, each showing one session per day. But after the premiere of "A Gentle Fist" at the Cannes Film Festival, some journalists doubted that the film would be released in our country. Sergei Loznitsa is no stranger to such a situation: accusations of "denigration" were already heard in relation to his feature debut "My Happiness" (2010), whose hero also found himself in the thick gloom of Russian timelessness.

All this is somewhat reminiscent of the films that Kira Muratova made in collaboration with Renata Litvinova: the monologue about a crematorium on wheels is not much inferior to the famous story about a boy who hanged himself because of unhappy love, but "did not spoil in the sun, but mummified, because he was not fat." If we talk about more obvious sources of inspiration, the absurdity and grotesqueness of "A Gentle Creature" came not only from Russian literature (in particular, the same Dostoevsky), but also from "Alice in Wonderland" - because the heroine is Alice, traveling through an enchanted world.

But this enchanted world is Russia. More precisely, the former USSR: "The Gentle One" with its seemingly recognizable Russian landscapes was actually filmed in Daugavpils, Latvia. The Soviet Union, which formally no longer exists, actually exists - like a ghost, a haze enveloping reality. Time stumbled, as if crashing into something, began to fold like an accordion - and metal detectors at train stations coexist perfectly with authorities from the 1990s, and they with Lyudmila Zykina, singing on the radio: "Heart, the image of a native birch tree is always with you!" And modern employees of "Russian Post" are rude just as indifferently, with the same words ("Woman, I am not an information bureau!"), as they were rude in 1984.

The key feature of the USSR was the humiliation of human dignity – and this is the core of “The Meek One”, in which the humiliated and insulted heroes do not even suspect the very concept of “dignity”. Of course, the prison and the city it formed are the ideal embodiment of this humiliation (gestures around herself, Akhedzhakova’s heroine asks: “Sometimes it seems to me that someone forgot to include all this in the prison – did they not have enough wire?”) In the last frame, Meek One wakes up, and her compatriots around her remain sitting in the station waiting room, immersed in a collective slumber, not knowing what they are waiting for. Loznitsa also does not know what to expect, or how to wake them up. In the end, he can always say that his main profession is a documentarian. Even when he records collective nightmares that obsessively penetrate reality.

The author is a special correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda

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